Teaching
University of Chicago
Science, Governance, and the Crisis of Liberalism
In the era of "post-truth" it has become common to link a crisis of scientific authority with a crisis of liberalism. Democracies around the world are under threat, this reasoning goes, in part because of an attack on scientific truth. But what does liberalism - as political culture and as a form of governance - need (or want) from science? Depending where you look, the answer might appear to be facts, truth, a model 'public sphere,' an ethic of objectivity, tactics for managing risk and uncertainty, or technologies of population management (to name a few). In addition to exploring the complex historical relationship between science and liberalism in the modern era, this course will critically assess how the history of science and the history of political thought have theorized truth and governance. We will examine what models of "coproduction" and "social construction" - nearly ubiquitous in the historiography of modern science - fail to capture about the histories of science and state power. We will also think about how political and intellectual historians' theories of truth and mendacity in politics might be enriched by more attention to scientific knowledge in both its technical and epistemological forms. This course focuses on 19th- and 20th-century Europe and the United States in global perspective, and readings will draw from political theory, history, economic thought, the natural and human sciences, and critical theory.
Global Environmental Humanities
Hurricanes, heat waves, polar vortexes, wild fires. Climate makes the news these days. As “natural” disasters and extreme weather become more common, problems that scientists have been warning of for a generation are suddenly at the forefront of our imaginations, and perhaps our fears. And yet talking about the environment on a global scale has proven challenging. How do we as political actors, scholars, and citizens begin to understand, let alone respond to, a problem as large and complicated as worldwide climate change? Climate change, it turns out, is not just a climate problem but an everything problem.
Together we will interrogate political, ethical, and epistemological questions raised by climate change. We will interrogate the term Anthropocene, broadly used to register the impact of humans upon the global climate, but also a candidate to become an official geological epoch. Reading texts from across the humanities and social sciences, we will attend to the ways that “environment” registers in political, aesthetic, and social life. Are our existing tools of representation adequate to the challenges of climate change? Can human exceptionalism, the idea the humans are qualitatively apart from nature, hold up in this time of deepening environmental crisis? What is our responsibility to other people, and to our planet?
Gaming History
Co-Taught with Katherine Buse and Brad Bolman
How do games reflect, theorize, and alter history? This interdisciplinary research seminar will explore the history, design, and function of games, drawing on strategies from history, media and game studies, and cultural anthropology in order to understand the place of games in the history of knowledge and our knowledge of history. How have historical simulations, such as Civilization, represented scientific, social, and cultural progress? How do games, such as Settlers of Catan, invite players to perform and inhabit historically specific subjectivities? What is the role of popular titles, such as Call of Duty: Cold War, in the pedagogy of public history? By representing alternate and future histories, games articulate theories of historical change. They even change the future by suggesting and popularizing modes of political, economic, and social agency. In this course, we will play games about history, including video games, tabletop games, and other analog game formats, to consider how they represent the structure of time, causality, and choice. Through class discussions, example games, and theoretical readings, we will learn about methods, theories, and case studies for gaming history and historicizing games. Students will practice original archival, ethnographic, and media archaeological research into the history of games, and gain experience writing about and critically analyzing media objects. The seminar will emphasize practice-based research alongside traditional humanistic research, including critical game play and game design. The course will culminate in a solo or collaborative game design project that intervenes in gaming culture and its histories.
Ways of Knowing
Co-Taught with Katherine Buse
This seminar introduces students to the processes of knowledge formation that shape our understandings of nature, our theories of social life, and our projections of possible futures. “Ways of Knowing” examines how claims to knowledge emerge out of disciplinary, historical, and political contexts, as well as local cultural factors both explicit and unspoken. How do we decide what we know and don’t know? How have societies produced, stabilized, or disrupted knowledge? How do techniques of inscription, observation and mediation—like seismographs, experiments, and simulations—allow us to see what we know and to know what we see? The course will take an expansive approach to knowledge formation by considering the interface of epistemology, social theory, technology, and governance.
The End of Certainty? Chaos, Complexity, and Human Life
What is uncertainty? Is it a temporary state of affairs, a situation to be resolved with more data, or is it permanent feature of our world? This course examines how uncertainty, once understood as the absence of knowledge, has become an object of knowledge in its own right. We will pay particular attention to the fields of chaos theory and complexity science, which emerged in the late twentieth century from physics and mathematics but have since become widely applied sciences, making their way into fields as diverse as molecular biology and economic theory. Together we will follow the path of 'complexity' in its many forms, reading texts by geneticists, physicists, climate scientists, philosophers, economists and many others. By the end of the course we will have developed a shared archive of uncertainty, and gained a better understanding of how uncertainty underpins what we do, in fact, know
Biology, Technology, and Politics in 20th-Century Europe
This course surveys central topics at the intersection of biology, technology, and politics in modern Europe. These include mechanization and labor, colonialism, eugenics and racism, gender and sexuality, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, bioethics and reproduction. Just as importantly, however, the course is designed to introduce you to a range of methodological approaches to these topics: we will read work by biologists, philosophers, historians, playwrights, anthropologists, sociologists, and critical theorists. Our syllabus proceeds roughly chronologically, albeit with some diversions in the service of thematic coherence. Beginning in the early twentieth century, we explore the following questions: How did the growing salience of the life sciences transform the social, physical, psychological, and working lives of Europeans? How was biology invoked to authorize specific social and political agendas, both in colonial and European contexts? How did the ascendency of genetics reshape so many questions central to what it means to be human?
Biology and Human Nature
What does science tell us about what it means to be human? From neo-Darwinian theory to the discovery of the structure of DNA to the emergence of epigenetics, we tend to understand biological sciences in particular as speaking directly to political, social, and philosophical questions. This seminar examines how key moments in the history of biology ramified into cultural and philosophical understandings of human nature, with attention to how scientists themselves describe the meaning of their work. Topics will include: neurology, psychology, primatology, evolutionary theory, embryology, molecular biology, genetics, and epigenetics.
Philosophies of Life before and after DNA
What is life? Most of us learn in high-school biology that life is some combination of growth, reproduction, and animation, and that it always contains DNA. Yet upon reflection, this definition is unsatisfying. This quarter we will explore some of the philosophical implications of modern biology by reading some of the best twentieth-century thinkers on the subject. The authors we will read have distinct theories about the nature of life, but they share the belief that understanding organic life, not simply spiritual or intellectual life, but the material basis of existence, is a fundamental task for thought. What makes these texts so exciting is that they were written during a time when biology itself was undergoing a series of profound revolutions, most notably (for us), the molecular turn and the discovery of the structure of DNA. As a result of these discoveries, ultimately some thinkers came to wonder, does life exist at all?
After taking this course you will have a grounding in the core philosophical problems that are raised by modern biology about the concept of life. You will gain an understanding of the ways that science, far from simply providing answers, continually furnishes us with new questions about the nature of existence, many of which may be outside the scope of science itself. This course emphasizes close reading and careful analysis of texts. You will be asked “think with” the text before you begin to critique it; this is a crucial skill for the study of philosophy and intellectual history, or indeed any humanist endeavor
The End of History from Hegel to the Large Hadron Collider
In this course we will consider some ways of conceptualizing historical and human time as finite. In the modern period, large-scale historical events have often been interpreted as portending an “end” of history: from the revolutions of the nineteenth century to the catastrophe of the World Wars in the mid-twentieth, to globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the threat of climate change. This quarter we will ask what it means ethically, epistemologically, and methodologically to think and to write about an “end” of history. Our focus will be on the modern period, and above all on the twentieth century. How has the sense of an imminent end shaped understandings of history, ideology, war, the human, and the environment? How do narratives of catastrophe and apocalypse shape the relationship between history, politics, and ethics?
Some of the texts we will read attempt to grapple with the “end of history” on a methodological level. Others are urgent calls to ward off nuclear or environmental catastrophe. Still others urge us carefully to imagine our post-apocalyptic future rather than deny it. Throughout, we will pay careful attention to the ways that each different imagination of the end – the end of ideology, the end of history, the end of man, the end of nature – speaks to the importance of history in the present.
Columbia University
Contemporary Civilization (yearlong introduction to political theory)